First impression of comparative tests on virtualisation technologies

I’m working on doing some tests to compare different virtualisation technologies. Whilst those tests are far from finished, I got some numbers this afternoon who give a quick first impression.

What is being tested here?

Running some specific processes

Timing how long they run

On a virtual guest (1 for now) on different platforms

Host environment?
Five servers, each running a different virtualisation platform, running on a machine with 2 quad cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz with 12GB RAM. One 160GB SATA 2.25″ 5400RPM disk per server, of which around 120GB is used for the guest disks (LVM).

The 5 different platforms are:

VMWare ESXi 4.0

Red Hat / CentOS 5.4 with Xen 3.0

Red Hat / CentOS 5.4 with KVM 83

Debian Lenny with Xen 3.2

Ubuntu Karmic with KVM 0.11

Guest environment?
All the guests are running Debian Lenny, in a vm with 512M Ram, with 2 virtual processors. And a file system of around 6GB. Virtual disks are LVM logical volumes on disk on the server host. Xen guest are runnig in paravirtualisation mode with the domU kernel available in Lenny, KVM guests are configured with virtio hardware. VMWare emulates Intel(R) PRO/1000.

There are 20 clients deployed on each server. So far I ran tests on 1 concurrent guest only. The dual concurrent client tests are running whils I write this, I’ll hope the scripts will keep running during the weekend

A quick peek in the test logs showed me following numbers. The items should speak for themselves, tthey are noted as

The biggest thing to note would be a lesser performance of Redhat + Xen when it comes to processor load, but keep in mind that this is an older version of Xen. On the other hand The respective older version of KVM on Red hat plays rhather well. I expect Xen to perform better when it comes to disk access.

There are other tests being processed also (iperf, iozone, tbench, dbench) but I can’t give a quick overview of those as the time to run is irrelevant for those.